This is just hilarious - but surprisingly beautiful.
Monks in Thailand built a temple from empty beer bottles. And yes, I’m talking a real temple, where people go to pray and meditate.
You can see pictures of the probably only temple made out of beer bottles in the world at Treehugger!
Just recently I found Stephen Cysewski’s photographs on the web and contacted him. He seems to be a really nice chap and was kind enough to give permission to publish some of his pictures here.
I just want to share some of them here:
(I have no idea what’s in there, but it surely looks interesting! Who came up with this idea? This is in Wat Klong Toey Nok).
This is also an interesting picture - depicting a scene from the Buddha’s life that is not so often illustrated as vividly as here (in fear of distracting the monks from their meditations).
As you can see, Buddhism too has it’s lower realms that you don’t want to get into…
This is from a temple in Supan Buri
In Chaochengsao.
Buddhist monks during a ceremony.
All pictures (C) by Stephen Cysewski, www.WanderingInThailand.com - you can see more of his pictures there.
In my opinion, many of his most beautiful photographs are from everyday life in Thailand, but since this blog is about Bangkok’s temples I didn’t want to post them here. However, if you do appreciate beautiful photography, I recommend you visit his website.
Here you can see a Thai temple that is in construction in Thailand.
They’re covering up all around the sites here, this is a pretty “high-class” temple and they have lots of funding from wealthy Thai-Chinese donors.
Here’s another temple in Bangkok where you can see construction going on:
And in the next picture you can see a picture of a temple in construction from the inside:
This one is a really nice video clip from the temple of dawn (Wat Arun)
See this free video tour in the Wat Phra Keo temple in Thailand. Wat Phra Keo is where the Emerald Buddha is located and is the most revered buddhist shrine in Thailand. If you ever come to Thailand, there’s a 200 THB admission fee, around 5 USD and it’s well worth to explore such a huge temple complex.
The Wat Arun in Bangkok (also known as Temple of Dawn or Wat Chaeng) can be seen when you stand at the Chao Phraya river nearly the Wat Pho temple. It’s on the other side of the river (Wat Pho is on the East side of the river, Wat Arun is on the West side of the Chao Phraya River).
It has a very unique style compared to other temples in Bangkok. In general, Thai temples are very colorful, but this one is different. It’s decorated with seashells, pieces of Chinese porcelain and colored glass.
The temple was built before Bangkok became the capital of Thailand - back then it used to be Ayutthaya, which is located about one hour north of Bangkok.
According to the TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) the temples “prang” is 104 meters high.